Where’d You Go, Absent Blogger? A Year in the Life of a Determined Reader.

‘Where’d You Go, Absent Blogger?’ I hear you ask (or maybe not, but roll with me for a moment.)

‘Does thou not read anymore? To post no book reviews?’

Why no, loyal reader. If anything, I read too much and have too many books and too little time.

It is the year 2018, the year in which I must read the books I have chosen for this 365 days, or wallow in shame for all eternity.

Disclaimer: I blame a fellow bookseller.

A reading journal seemed like a fun idea when the idea first swept by me. I have no artistic talent, so it wasn’t going to be one of those gorgeous, arty, stylish journals no matter how hard I tried (although I was determined to put at least one drawing in there, for the sake of pride.)

A couple of years ago Andy Miller gave a talk on my creative writing course about his book ‘The Year of Reading Dangerously’. A left the talk full of plans – I was going to read ‘The Odyssey’, and ‘Middlemarch’ would not defeat me after the first paragraph.

Alas, life got in the way, ‘The Odyssey’ was put on a back bench until after my studies, ‘Middlemarch’ was put in the loft, and bookselling and blogging introduced so many other books to me, ones that I had to review promptly, that I forgot about that promise I’d made to myself.

That is until this year, when on the 1st January 2018, my Kindle broke.

Now I am a very firm lover of the book in its original form, but for my work as a book blogger, my Kindle was an important part. My reviews came from reading egalleys from Netgalley and publishers, and I never got into reading on the Kindle App on an iPad or phone, so Kindle was the way I did it.

What to do, I asked myself. Debating on whether to buy a new Kindle (after only two years of the last one!), I stared at one of my many bookshelves.

I have a lot of books. Alright, I know people always say that. People come into the bookshop I work in and claim the same. I soon get out of them, that their idea of ‘lot of books’ is actually a pile next to their bed. My ‘lot of books’ I have accumulated in my 25 years of life, and 3 1/2 years as a bookseller consist of 10 full size bookcases double-stacked, dozens of full cardboard and heavy duty plastic boxes in two lofts, the same in a garage, in boxes under my bed, under the spare bed, in my wardrobe, in my locker at work…you get the idea. If me and my bookseller boyfriend put all our books together we’d have a nice little library.

And still I buy more.

So I decided in that moment, 2018 would not be the year of the kindle, but a year of getting through some of the books I have bought and that have sat patiently on my shelf (or in boxes) for longer than they ought to have.

I started with 18 books that I have to read this year – with some others in between, as my Goodreads reading challenge is to read 60 books.

Below is my ‘To-Read 2018’ and my ‘2018 Goodreads Reading Challenge’ when I first started. Follow the link here to see how I’ve been progressing in my journey.